Saturday, January 14, 2017

From Vietnam to Palestine: Reconciling the Present and the Past

(Note: an abridged version of this post appeared in The Palestine Chronicle at http://www.palestinechronicle.com/from-vietnam-to-palestine-reconciling-the-present-and-the-past/ )

It is getting a bit disorienting on this trip to Vietnam, I
admit. In the hotel at Hoi An I look at the sign above our table: ‘Abu Square,’
it says. Who is this Abu-Hurair? Could I be in Jerusalem or Nablus and not in a
foreign country? But in Palestine they would have written the sign in Arabic. Or
perhaps in Hebrew! And there were no tsunamis in Palestine, not ocean tsunamis
anyway. The man is acknowledged in death for his heroic actions in the 2004 tsunami
in which he apparently sacrificed his life to rescue others. Too bad, none of
the hotel staff know any more details about the late Arabic name holder.

At the poolside after breakfast that morning Laiali, my
younger granddaughter, wants me to join her for a swim. I see a teenage girl
across the pool and encourage Laiali who is a socializing pro to make the
girl’s acquaintance and see if she wants to swim with her. Laiali says she has
already befriended that one nine years ago. It turns out I didn’t recognize
Malaika, my older granddaughter, as the shapely teen at the far side of the
pool.

Yes, Vietnam is confusing. It is the living proof that the
impossible is doable. Vietnam
did the impossible. And the reverse is an equally valid truism as well: The
impossible is claiming Vietnam. Victory over one imperial capitalistic power
after the other is crowned with rampant capitalism at the lower rung of
development. Most impossible of all is that in the midst of all of that I am
lolling in the recreated French decadence at Hanoi’s legendary Sofitel
Metropole Hotel.

Reconciling the present with the past is increasingly
demanding with age. What should be easier to do is to plough ahead with
whatever you damn will as long as you can afford it. For the powerful and their
erased victims, that becomes history. Unless, like the Vietnamese, you resist
and win. On my morning check of the day’s home front headlines in Haaretz one
screams at me with the usual injustice such logic means: The Israel Land
Authority plans to turn Lifta into a fancy neighborhood of private residences
for Jews rich enough to afford it. Obviously, to the ILA planners, this is just
another step in its standard process of creating facts on the ground. The
Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, … and the Arabs came, erased or reconfigured
what they found in their own image and we now will do the same. That is history
and each practices the art of reshaping it to his taste to the degree his power
allows him to feel entitled to do. Who is to say how much or how little change
each new era had inflicted on the historical remains it inherited? It is
Israel’s turn to shape history to reflect what its rulers want: Let Lifta, or
whatever name the Zionist rapists will call the new rendition of the
‘abandoned’ Palestinian village, reflect the modernity and plushness of the
cream of Israeli society. Once they are done with their ‘renovations,’ whatever
is left becomes the new reality. This obviously is at the heart of the process
to erase the likes of Lifta, 531 towns and villages by Israel’s own count, from
space and memory (See Noga Kadman: Erased
from Space and Consciousness, Indiana University Press, 2015.) It is what
the Zionists had planned for all of ‘greater Israel’ and what they have
practiced since the day they wrought the Nakba on my people. The occasion is
most opportune for them to do whatever they wish. They have the power, the
money and the chutzpa.

This all flashed in my mind as I saw the news item on the
Internet. But the irreconcilability of past and present is a theme that seems
always to accompany me as I accompany my children’s families on their American
style touristic ventures. This time it is Vietnam: We are at the
Intercontinental in Saigon, another venue that offers you the world provided
you can pay for it. And some American is the ultimate beneficiary of the ‘dry
cleaning’ scheme. After breakfast my wife and I step out into the real world of
the Vietnamese: A couple of blocks and we have to push our way through a mass
of mostly young disheveled peasantry that crowds the sidewalk across the
scooter-filled street from a well-fenced compound. Twice we inquire from
individuals about the explanation for this but neither speaks English. My
entire Vietnamese vocabulary is limited to a single name, Ho Chi Minh. I smile
inanely as I look at the street name, Le Duan. That too rings familiar from the
1960s when we marched in anti-war protests led by ‘Saigon Jane.’ And the name
of General Giap resurfaces in my memory. So there! I can connect to this
place. But what is all this milling
crowd doing here and what is this compound they all are eyeing across the street?
A man on crutches approaches, his miniscule and malformed lower extremity
sticking at a sharp angle to the side. We ask him about the gathered crowd. He
doesn’t understand, offering us lottery tickets instead. We had seen a few of
this type of congenital malformation, what we doctors call phocomelia, on the
streets of Saigon. It is the aftereffect of dowsing the jungle with Agent
Orange and other chemical defoliants. It makes Didi uncomfortable: “I feel responsible,”
she says.

We return to our hotel to wait for the day’s tour guide and
transportation. When he arrives we ask about the large gathering of uneasy locals
we saw milling on the sidewalk.

“Ah, that is the American consulate. They wait for their
visas,” he says.

As we pass there again on our way to the dock to take a boat
up the river, he explains that the compound is relatively new. The old one was
destroyed in the last days of the war.

“And that structure at the corner is a memorial to our
victory,” he adds.

It is striking, almost disappointing, to sense so little
local enmity to Americans. There is no air of seeking vengeance, of holding a
grudge. Everyone who knows enough English to interact with us foreigners is so
damn polite it feels insulting. Yet there is little sense of subservience in
the way all the tour guides, the waiters, the sellers manning the stalls in the
downtown marketplace, the street food vendors and all the entrepreneurs trying
to make a living by offering us their wares and services. Poverty seems to be
the standard average state of affairs. Yet in this proud nation poverty does
not dehumanize its subjects or rob them of dignity like it does in India or
Egypt for example.

There are no beggars in the Vietnam we saw. Everyone is busy
eking out a living, whether by boiling vegetables on the sidewalk with herbs
and a strip of pork gut or of chicken skin for flavoring, or by ferrying
fruits, vegetables or fish in their rowboats. Or take the more picturesque
bamboo stick on the shoulder with a hanging basket at each end: The weight of
the transported produce from their farms forces those men and women with their
petite figures to adapt to a dance-like up-and-down agile gait. The ubiquitous
balancing act and dance show is specially uplifting when viewed at a crossroad
from a safe distance as the performers merge gracefully with the anthill like
swarm of scooter and bicycle riders and emerge unscathed at the other side of
the road, totally unaware of the magic they had just performed. It is that
seeming graceful total acceptance of their daily struggle that impels me to
marvel at the ingenuity and steadfastness of the common Vietnamese citizen.
Something in the acceptance and unawareness of the simple farmer or fisherman
and woman of the miracle they have wrought fills me with pride and happiness.
And the way they scurry and scatter at the sight of the police inspectors
brings back images of all those Palestinian village women with their hand-woven
baskets full of farm produce on their heads melting away into the side alleys
of the market place in East Jerusalem. I
know I admired and savored the simple elegance of the one-color tunics worn by
Vietnamese women. But now, in trying to see them with my mind’s eye after the
fact, they insist on appearing with colorful and intricate Palestinian designs
hand-embroidered on their more bosomy chests. They still parade across my
mind’s stage with their gracefully balanced bamboo sticks and hanging baskets.
But they show up in Palestinian outfits. And one of them, fully Vietnamese, is
hugging a damaged olive tree as she faces the blade of a Caterpillar.

Another noticeable absence in Vietnam is that of obese
people: I don’t recall seeing a single overweight Vietnamese person. This is a
separate observation from the overall miniscule size of the average person
whether adult or child. This is reflected in the size and shape of local wear.
When I bargained for half a dozen underwear for my use they were marked triple
extra large instead of my American medium size. And they are flat, lacking the
space for the buttock bulge. They seem to be made for tiny people with flat
behinds. And no bulges upfront either. Searching my memory now, all I can see
are stick-like figures, thin sticks at that with no bulges in either direction.
Peculiar, isn’t it? Hardly any pregnant women in my recollected multitudes.
Where do all those young people on their tuck-tucks come from?

Speaking of which, the traffic pattern is mind-boggling. I
can’t imagine myself driving in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. And I have driven in
Paris and Cairo and survived. Here there is smoothness and plasticity to the
flow of the massive number of vehicles, especially motorcycles, bicycles and
Japanese-made small cars. When the lights change pedestrians are added to the
random mix of crawlers that manages miraculously not to collide. Laboring to
understand the fluidity of this pattern I came to the conclusion that everyone
is excessively aware and respectful of the other while moving in the
expectation of the swarm acknowledging and caring for him or her. This sense of
reciprocity is what counts. I swear, in the ten days that we spent in Vietnam I
did not see a single traffic accident though I was repeatedly at the verge of
causing near-accidents myself. What seems like total chaos has an inner logic
that works no less than New York’s aggressive pushiness of both pedestrians and
drivers.

What is more significant is that, as far as our limited
contacts with the Vietnamese permitted us to judge, they have forgiven the
Americans. Their evident attitude is one of pride in their heroic achievement
of kicking the French colonialists then the American overlords out, not to
mention the Chinese as the traditional regional superpower and masters of old.
There is an undercurrent of acceptance of what happened as part of the nation’s
fate: They had to live through a tough and long fight and they always knew they
would win; they are happy it is all behind them. With the new economic policy
of opening up to the global capitalist outreach, it is everyone’s opportunity
to make the most out of it and the American tourists are as good as any others
and likely better customers. To me as a total outsider the question keeps
surfacing, in my gut if not in my mind, as to what was that long war all about?
All the hotels at which we stayed were parts of lead global capitalist chains
that skim the thick crust off of the commercial brew even if that benefits some
local partners and a chain of local employees. One is forced to wonder why did
Henry Kissinger instigate all of America’s atrocities against the Vietnamese when
he presumably had the brains and foresight to figure this kind of end result? I
am not blinded by this example to all of his other crimes against humanity. But
this is so blatant it cries for an answer from one side or the other. Is this
what Ho Chi Minh had fought all his life for? If the capitalist globalization
is to be invited into Hanoi and Saigon after the victory, why fight it in the
first place? Is the symbolic change of
Saigon’s name to that of Ho Chi Minh worth all the digging of tunnels and the
obstinate struggle of a whole people to keep the north and the south together?
Also here I am unable to reconcile that past with the present I am
experiencing.

An hour and a half, one fruit snack and one full meal later
we made it to our destination, a corner of the Vietnamese jungle on the bank of
the Saigon River that had been adapted as a tour site expounding the exploits
of the Viet Cong fighters that brought the American empire to its knees. The
jungle had grown back from its low point of defoliation by Agent Orange and
massive DDT spraying to render it uninhabitable and to force it to expose its
secrets. The next couple of hours we spent checking the multi-level underground
labyrinth of tunnels that hid the local fighters and gave them the element of
surprise against the American forces. We, especially our more supple and less
bulky granddaughters, sized the tunnels and crawled through sections of this jungle
subterranean city that had been widened to permit American tourists. We were
shown the tunnel air vents camouflaged as termite hills and heard a description
of the inventive multilevel underground architecture. The most ingenious seemed
to be the especially designed network of tunnels with holding airspaces and
long passages to contain, partially absorb and delay the release of the smoke
from the underground daily cooking. Cooking was timed to take place after midnight
so that the final delayed release coincided with the dawn jungle fog. We also
were shown the various types of booby-traps the locals rigged for the American
troops. It is a cruel testimony to the native ingenuity that was betted against
the massive American power. It was the inventiveness of the locals and their
ingrained familiarity with and adaptability to their natural environment
against fighting men armed to the teeth and backed by the limitless explosive
power of mighty America. The Viet Cong, nearly adding up to the entire
Vietnamese nation, tricked America to fight them in their jungle backyards.
Then, with their endless decoys, they duped the American troops to walk into
their improvised monstrous mousetraps. There must have been many other factors,
but the way our guide described it, and the way I ended understanding it at the
psychological level, it was those innocent looking little creatures adept at
melting into their natural background outsmarting the hulky foreign fighters and
forcing them in their tortured solitary dying moments in those trap ditches
with metal spikes piercing their innards to reconsider their aggression. What
was it all for, they must have asked themselves. There must have been those who
survived the natives’ inventive cruelty. With time all of America was asking
that question.

On the boat trip back I attempted to communicate with our
local guide at a deeper level than the usual touristic façade of packaged sound
bites. I asked him if anyone in his family was considered a local hero in the
two-decade-long war with the Americans. He let out a depreciative yellow laugh:
His family was on the side of the pro-American forces and his father spent
three and a half years in a communist reeducation labor camp. “Foreigners don’t
quite comprehend it but the North and the South are two separate political
entities with different histories and cultures,” he added. Then, how come he
was so proud of Vietnam as a whole? Well, even in the South the true sentiment
of the common folk was with their Northern brothers and sisters struggling for
liberation. When you addressed the conflict as one between the Communists and
the Americans, that was when you could separate North and South. It sounded
confusing, which irked me. Spontaneously, I launched into an account of what
goes on in my country of origin, Palestine.

“There,” I explained, “what people get confused about is actually
a clear case of settler colonialism whose perpetrators, the Zionists and their
supporters in the West, want you to believe is a historical conflict with
religious roots between two equal sides. In fact its settler nature makes it
more vicious to the native Palestinians than the French ever were to you. The
French wanted you to serve them, not to disappear from your own land.”

“Who said the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was all that straight
forward,” he said in a patronizing tone.

I felt sick to my stomach. It could have been the boat ride.

“A conflict implies two equal sides with equally valid
claims,” I was now shouting. “I just finished telling you our case is not a
conflict but an aggression by foreign settler colonialists. Can’t you get that
straight?”

I was relieved to disembark and rushed to the waiting bus.
No tip for this Zionist sympathizer, I decided. Thin skin, you may think. But
if a Palestinian can’t get automatic sympathy and full understanding from a
Vietnamese, what hope do we have?

At tea hour I didn’t have much better luck. Because of my
upset stomach I arrived early. A gracious waitress kept suggesting different
tropical fruits. In appreciation I informed her that I was a fruit addict.

“At home in Palestine I have freshly-picked seasonal fruits
from my garden for breakfast every single day of the year,” I said.

And I listed a few varieties. The young woman smiled and
bowed repeatedly in appreciation.

“Nice country!” she kept repeating.

I left her a good tip. On my way out I nodded at her and she
bowed deeply with a big smile.

“I never met someone from Pakistan before,” she told me with
a seductive sparkle in her eyes.

The one who walked away with my prize was the souvenir
seller at the seaside in Hoi An. That day at noon the rain stopped and we
walked out along the edge of the stormy sea in search of a local seafood spot.
The whole beachfront seemed desolate. ‘till a restaurant owner spotted us and
offered to set up a table under the trees a safe distance from the waves. She
turned out to be the sole restaurant staff: cook, waitress and busboy. After taking
our orders and bringing us our cold beers and peanuts she disappeared in her
kitchen. At another table I saw a tray of handcrafted trinkets. I went over to
admire and fumble the curious items. Out of nowhere a middle-aged woman
materialized and rushed me with a hug.

“Welcome my dear friend,” she said in good English.

May be because I didn’t expect it, that hug felt sincere and
very personal. As “my friend” started
showing me her souvenirs and demonstrating what one can do with them, I dwelled
on that hug; it meant the world to me. There was no doubt in my mind that she
recognized my settler-colonialist brutalized Palestinian roots. I was afraid of
ruining the automatic camaraderie between us with too many words. She asked for
an obviously high price and I decided not to haggle with my freshly acquired
partner in the struggle against colonialism and its depravity. I gave her the
full amount she asked for not in payment for the trinkets but more in
recognition and appreciation of her spirit of obvious solidarity with Palestine
and the Palestinians. The warmth of her welcoming hug and the sincerity of her
full support of my cause was overwhelming. We were fellow working class members
and it was only right to share our resources. Walking back to our seaside
resort I refrained from talking to anyone for fear of disturbing my inner
composure or ruining my sense of oneness with the whole of humanity represented
in that single souvenir seller.

In Hanoi we visited the old French jail, nicknamed ‘the Hanoi
Hilton,’ a short taxi ride from the luxury of our renovated French hotel. Within
minutes we shifted from enjoying the type of super-luxurious accommodations the
French had built for themselves on the backs of their local servants to touring
the prime torture facility they had constructed for those among such servants
who dared attempt to shake off the yoke of slavery. Mentally and emotionally
reconciling the two opposite ends of what the French colonialists had actually
practiced was one challenge. Another was to process the current love-hate
relationship of the Vietnamese and the Americans: The French had constructed those
vicious isolation and agony chambers to imprison and torment rebels in their
colonial domain of Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.) Later, during the
twenty-year long war with America, the Communist forces used the very same
facility to extend the same ‘hospitality’ to American prisoners, including some
destined in years to come to rise to iconic political prominence such as the Republican
presidential candidate John McCain. And here we were, Americans, with the stray
Palestinian, being guided, beguiled and mentally bribed to focus on what those
damned French had contrived in the way of torture implements and of cruel and
inhumane treatment of fellow humans for nothing but their different race and
their heroic insistence on gaining freedom. Somehow, on the way both sides lost
track of what ‘we,’ Americans and
Vietnamese, had done to each other more recently. We are charged for seeing
what the cruel French did to the heroic local resistance fighters, especially
to women among them. We hem-and-haw at those group iron shackles in the bare
cages and the grotesque ladder-like monstrous ‘necklaces’ for those condemned
to death. We decry the cruelty of the absent third party and exchange our tips
for the locals’ helpful information as to where to go and what to see next. It
is all possible thanks to the camouflage of normality that the mighty dollar
and the global marketplace manage to spread across borders. It is almost enough
to make you sympathize with the North Koreans were it not for that boy’s
haircut.

Beyond the specifics of what we saw and its emotional
impact, at a deeper level, the logic of the act of ‘us, Americans,’ touring the
old prison, now a museum, is in itself inspirational. Leaving economics aside,
the full appreciation of the context and the meaning of the Vietnamese staff gleefully
hosting and guiding us takes one to my opening assertion of the inevitability
of the impossible. All along, the question keeps surfacing from my subconscious:
Regardless of how we get there, how soon will we, Palestinians, or perhaps
Palestinians and Israelis, be able to give guided tours to American and
European tourists, our avowed foes of the past, in the museumized Israeli
torture chambers, whether in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem or in Megiddo,
the Gilboa’a, Ketziot, Shikma, Nafha, … and the list is long? Or perhaps sell
them on visiting the Gaza tunnels and Israel’s cattle-cages at border
crossings.

Two episodes on this trip may help one ferret out the miasma
of mystery. At the start of our trip in New York, while at the initial
processing stage of ticketing and luggage checking, we discovered that we
needed a visa in advance of flying to Vietnam. Our two responsible adult trip
planners had misread the instructions. They got busy on their smart phones and
unearthed an address in Saigon that offered the needed mediation with officials
for a sizable fee. The man on the other end sounded convincing and our side was
desperate enough to shell out the charges. The mediation worked fine with the
airline staff that seemed to know of the option though they didn’t suggest it
themselves. At the other end in Saigon our contact was waiting for us with a
sign. We handed him our passports and he disappeared briefly before returning
them and retreating to watch us un-intrusively from a distance. The border
police, who obviously saw what was happening, formally instructed us to wait in
line like everyone else. We did and when our turn came we were welcomed with a
ready stamp, no questions asked. Our contact then met us on the other side of
the line of immigration booths, welcomed us again, shook our hands and
disappeared. Throughout he whole thing everyone maintained an air of
respectable formality. Something about the way everyone involved conducted
himself seemed deliberately unobtrusive and respectful of each other’s
authority. It almost made mediation at a price honorable.

Arabic literary tradition permits me to end with the
celebratory note of ‘wakhitamuha misk—the
end is scented with musk,’ a romantic and flowery rendition of the epitaph ‘all
is well that ends well.’ My wife’s childhood friend in Hawaii, who had taught
English in South Vietnam in the 1960s and has since become a fan of all things
Vietnamese, put us in touch with her friend, Dang Nhat Minh. He is a writer and
a movie director of our age, perhaps the lead movie director in Vietnam,
credited with rekindling the rapprochement process with the USA through his
award-winning movies. We met for dinner on our last evening in Hanoi.
Unfortunately, our nonexistent French and his modicum of French-y English
limited the extent of our discourse. I itched to tell him about the struggle
and success of ‘my friend’ in Galilee, Mohammad Bakri, and his trials and
tribulations as the Palestinian movie director of Jenin Jenin. Perhaps it is not too late to invite Minh to come over
sometime to Arrabeh on a private visit. Not only Mohammad but a whole slew of
rising Palestinian movie directors we know or could easily contact can benefit
from a lesson on how to tell one’s full truth without gaining the wrath of the
powerful, how to reconcile your present with ‘their’ past. Or does that require
educating all of Israel in peace-mindedness? Well, when Minh comes on his
private visit to Arrabeh, ‘they’ all are invited.

As we stepped out of the restaurant we walked into an open
ballroom dance marathon in the neighborhood’s public park. That seemed to sum
it all up including the honor of meeting Minh and the love-hate relationship of
colonizer and colonized, past and present. Rhoda, our daughter, and Seth, her
husband, joined the locals in a Tango swirl before we said our goodbyes.

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